Many consumers desire to order items or goods remotely, e.g., on-line, through the Internet, or using a specially designed application or app on a personal computer or mobile device, such as a tablet or cell phone. At least some known web hosting systems include search engines that allow consumers to enter search criteria and generate search results based on the consumer's search criteria. Known search engines may generate and display product lists to consumers via a website including products that are selected based on the search criteria. Some known search engines may also generate search relevance scores associated with selected products based on the search terms entered by the consumer.
In response to a search query, known search engines may also display a set of ranked items along with a snippet of textual information describing each item. In known product search engines, the search result snippets are usually in the form of static text providing information about the corresponding product. The information provided in known snippets includes general descriptions of the products without specific details or features relating to the displayed product. In known systems, users are required to click photos or general product descriptions to navigate to product-specific webpages that display the detailed information about the corresponding product features. This requires the user to continually navigate between product-specific webpages and the search results.
Because the information being displayed in the snippet is static, consumers may become frustrated with the displayed results, in part, because the snippet information may not be relevant to the search query received from the customer. As such, customers may navigate away from the search webpage, resulting in a reduction in an order conversion rate of the webpage and loss of potential orders generated via a product search.
In addition, in response to a product search request, at least some known search engines retrieve each product record contained in a database and display each product record in a sorted list. Because of the number of product records that may be included in a product database, at least some known search engines require significant computing time and resources to generate and display the sorted product lists to the consumer. As the amount of product records being included in a database increases, the amount of computing resources that are required to perform the search functions increase, thus reducing the overall performance of known web hosting systems.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems identified above.